I coded up a web-based IDE two years ago for my senior project at California State University Fresno and presented it to a group of entrepreneurs at the Central Valley Business Incubator. It was a student project, but it incorporated SVN on the backend and did some slick syntax highlighting in real time on the frontend. A user could login anywhere, code for a bit, commit changes and logoff.

They smiled and nodded, but it was evident that they had no idea what an IDE was let alone how a web-based IDE would enhance the development process.

It has been technically possible for years, but now with Mozilla's Tamarin, and Google's V8, more complex functionality can be added (webtellisense?).

mattnyc99 writes: Two interesting first-looks over at PopularMechanics.com's "Robot Week": a lengthy preview of this weekend's DARPA Urban Challenge, which unlike in past years will put self-driving vehicles through a world of parked cars, three-point turns and oncoming traffic; and a peek into the growing world of high-tech piracy on the open seas, which the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard are looking to cut off by investing in a new fleet of superfast, gun-mounted unmanned surface vessels (USVs). From the article: "The Interceptor is available now. But the USV market is just getting started: Two months ago, British defense firm Qinetiq debuted its own robotic vessel, the jetski-size Sentry. Among its potential duties is intruder investigation, which could include scouting out unidentified boats, along the lines of the raft that detonated alongside the USS Cole in Yemen, as well as offering a first look at a possible pirate-controlled vessel."

The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values — regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral.

For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one. The results suggest that individual cells in human brains might also have a fine-tuned preference for specific numerical values.

Munawar Iqbal writes: "With an onslaught of new processors and platforms monthly ever since late May, it looks like there's no slowing down of this segment anytime soon. Before we get swept by the next wave, we roundup results from dual-core processors of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 series, Intel Pentium D 900 series and of course the Core 2 Duo.

John Boitnott writes: "A strong earthquake hit the South Bay pretty hard Tuesday night. What's really interesting are the stories of the transplants — those who have only lived around the Bay Area for months or a few years. For many it is their first decent-sized temblor."

MarvinTm writes: "The making of a gay worm
JULIE STEENHUYSEN
Reuters
October 25, 2007 at 9:47 PM EDT
CHICAGO — Altering a gene in the brain of female worms changed their sexual orientation, U.S. researchers said on Thursday, making female worms attracted to other females.
The study reinforces the notion that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the brain, said Erik Jorgensen, scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah.
"They look like girls, but act and think like boys," Utah researcher Jamie White, who worked on the study published in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement.
Researchers in Dr. Jorgensen's lab switched on a gene in female worms that makes the body develop male structures, but they only activated the gene in the brain.
As a result, the female worms still had female bodies, but they behaved like males."

LinucksGirl writes: The problem with distributed computing is that everyone with the technology to reverse-engineer your crypto chip can listen to your broadcast and know exactly what you're trying to break. Build a robust distributed computing application that is opaque to observers — even those who have access to the source code — by attaching a simple neuron implementation to HTTP transport code.